Art for RPGs

I talked about werewolves, or loup garou, as they are called in France, in a series of Halloween posts that started here. In that series I included the H+I werewolf stats and an adventure seed based on the adventure I ran. In that adventure I showed the players this picture when they encountered their first real loup garou. 

Werewolf in My Bedroom by artikid 

Appropriately (though somewhat coincidentally) their first encountered with the creature actually did occur as it was  breaking into a woman's inn room. Even though the female NPC was not a sword wielding character, I think the art helped to depict the scene for the players making it seem more real or alive. Good art can do that.

The artist of this piece goes by the handle Artikid. But is also known as Luigi Castellani. He's a freelance artist who has done work for a number of OSR products including BRW games, Sine-Nomine Publishing or Small Niche Games. He did some of the great art for Spears of the Dawn. He recently announced on the RPGSite that he takes commissions.

My B/W art rates usually range from 20$ for quarter pagers or less to 80$ for full pagers. Complexity (or lack of it) of the piece may affect the basic rate.
Color usually costs twice.
At these prices I retain rights and may sell the art again to someone else.
Cover art and selling of rights is subject to negotiation.
I accept payment via paypal.

I've used commission art for a couple of campaigns. My co-GM commissioned head shots, from Dave Cummings, for our crew for the FASA Star Trek game. She also used character art from the previous campaign she had played in (Dave was the GM for the original Star Trek game from which our campaign was a spin out) as some of those characters appeared as NPCs or in the background of our campaign.

For our long-running Star Wars D6 campaign, I commissioned character art from Chris Irvin for my PC, her PC, and my wife's sometime PC/NPC. My avatar on RPGSite is a from one of my PC pictures.

Bren Fairchilde, Young Jedi Knight

Chris was an artist at Michigan State University's Virtual University. Chris was a lot of fun to work with and he did a great job on all the art. One of his more recent projects is Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse. I don't usually include stuff that is totally unrelated to the Early Modern Period or H+I on this blog, but Chris' art is so good I just had to include a few examples.

I find character art very helpful in envisioning characters and just a lot of fun to have in general. So check these guys out!

Here's some more of Chris' art.

Arkel Tevar Tris Lom’zee’tah’Skass Trofar Fas’Tawws

Murlyn Tarrick, X-Wing Pilot and Jedi Padawan

EDIT: I had to go back and recreate all the links for the pictures. Although they showed fine on my screen (natch) they didn't view on a friend of mine's screen. Sigh! I think it is fixed now.
EDIT 2: Fix didn't work. More research requited to get the links to work. Double sigh!